The Bleeding Edge of Metamodern Culture

Metamodernism is less radical than postmodernism, but it can still bring shockwaves into the culture.

Metamodernism: oscillating between serious modernism and ironic postmodernism

We halfheartedly pretend to live in a modern world. Sure, we still participate in land wars in Europe, where young men point metal sticks at each other that go pow pow. And sure, we still play an active role in maintaining slavery and child labor in order to extract rare-earth metals from the Congo…

But at the same time, in the West, God is dead, AI girlfriends have effectively passed the Turing Test, and five clicks on a screen gets hot pad thai delivered to your doorstep in thirty minutes. If that’s not peak modernity, what is?

Earlier this week a friend texted me, asking if I had any thoughts on metamodernism. I quickly read about it and gave a knee-jerk, half-kidding response: “Haven’t heard of metamodernism, but it sounds like a fancied-up description of the trad movement.”

I’ve since read up on metamodernism and I think my knee-jerk response may have been onto something…

Here’s the famous one-liner on metamodernism:

“Metamodernism oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naiveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”
- Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker

Fleshing this out a little more:

Whereas postmodernism was characterized by deconstruction, irony, pastiche, relativism, nihilism, and the rejection of grand narratives (to caricature it somewhat), the discourse surrounding metamodernism engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, romanticism, affect, and the potential for grand narratives and universal truths, whilst not forfeiting all that we’ve learnt from postmodernism.

Postmodernism was never a place where human culture could settle. For one thing, postmodernism leads to too many word games and too many piles of bullshit. Also, human culture simply doesn’t become settled. Never has and never will.

Metamodernism—as it has been described—does seem like a natural next step. It simultaneously accepts and rejects postmodernism. It tolerates both irony and sincerity. It’s of the modern world (with AI porn, pizza from DoorDash, Zoom calls from Miami when your boss thinks you’re in San Francisco), but it makes room for the fact of Russia’s land invasion of Ukraine. It oscillates and ultimately grounds us back in the land of the real-real, not the hyperreal.

One thing I’m not seeing in metamodernism is a work that epitomizes the viewpoint. I imagine in the height of the postmodern movement you could point to a work of art and say: that is the epitome of postmodernism! And you could analyze it to death and all roads would lead to getting deeper into the trenches of “understanding” postmodern thought.

The Shark by Damien Hirst is a good example (a “living sculpture” of a tiger shark looking fierce in a tank of formaldehyde). Casting Off My Womb is a recent example that still screams postmodernism (where performance artist Casey Jenkins knits from yarn inside her vagina).

But I really, really am not seeing the epitome—the bleeding edge—of metamodernism. All the boundaries in art have already been pushed to the extreme—in terms of irony and sincerity and every combination thereof. Turning from irony back toward sincerity can’t conceivably make a work more boundary pushing—inherently it has to be backstepping on the boundary pushing.

The ingredients for metamodernism are simply too disparate. And by definition they’re less radical than the fundamental ingredients of postmodernism.

So, what are we looking at in the world of metamodernism? Our culture is currently force-feeding us the adult cartoon Velma, where Indian-American Velma’s character is, according to Hollywood Reporter, “amusing, in the way that a string of clever tweets calling out overused tropes is amusing.” No doubt it’s both ironic and sincere, but exploring it in any depth would mean taking it seriously…which I just can’t do. In art, there’s Comedian, the banana duct-taped to the wall. There’s the pink wall in LA. I just watched The Menu and found metamodernism written all over it, but not in a particularly bleeding edge way…

Yet a movement needs something radical…right? Something that can be held up to the world so proponents can say: Look! This is our movement! This is the peak of modern humanity at this moment in time!

Which brings me back to the trad movement. A radical return to traditional values and family roles. A radical return to conceptions of life that—in all sincerity—must be said to “work” despite the fact that you can’t admit to being trad without saying it with a strong hint of irony.

You have to be fully invested in the project to successfully maintain a family. But, in today’s metamodern world, you can’t even begin to participate in the roles of mother/wife or father/husband without doing so with some level of self-consciousness and irony.

What if the bleeding edge of metamodern culture is a tradwife with a master’s degree from UC Berkeley and a squealing baby throwing Cheerios across the room? A short skirt and a long jacket. A camgirl side-hustle and a cross necklace. A feminist who rejects Nth-wave feminism.

The future is female, after all. And I do mean that sincerely (ironically), by the way.